This being Remembrance weekend, the match began with a minute’s silence and England’s players wore red poppies as well as red roses. But this past week marked another, far more trivial, anniversary too, one that went unlamented. Saturday was a year and a day since Stuart Lancaster quit as England’s head coach after the debacle of the World Cup. In terms of personnel, this England XV was not all that different from some that Lancaster fielded during his four years in charge. The pack was pretty much exactly the same as the one he picked in the autumn of 2013, only with Mako Vunipola at loosehead instead of Joe Marler. In pretty much every other respect, though, England were unrecognisable from the side who were booed by their own fans at this stadium 12 months ago.

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Eddie Jones’s England are still unbeaten and, following on from their Six Nations grand slam and their series whitewash in Australia, have achieved another notable victory – a first against South Africa since 2006 and the penultimate match of Andy Robinson’s career as head coach. Since then, England had played South Africa in 12 games under three different coaches – Lancaster, Martin Johnson, and Brian Ashton – and the best result they had managed was a 14-all draw in Port Elizabeth at the fag-end of their 2012 tour. Despite that, Jones, who spent two years working as a technical adviser for the Springboks, seemed so confident that he had South Africa’s measure you could almost have called him cocksure.

Certainly Jones knew what to expect. Always quick with a cute soundbite, he anticipated that the match would be like the Rumble in the Jungle. “We’re not shying away from the physical side of the game,” he said, “but, when Muhammad Ali fought George Foreman, he had to find other ways of getting around him. If he went toe-to-toe with him he was going to lose.”

Left unsaid, though, was that Ali’s tactics in that famous fight involved spending four rounds on the ropes and soaking up blows. “As heavy as the boom of oaken doors, bombs to the body, bolts to the head,” Norman Mailer wrote, while Ali “swayed and rattled and banged and shaken like a grasshopper at the top of a reed when the wind whips”.

This was one of the weaker South Africa teams to visit Twickenham in a long while, with a back row racked by injuries, but their head coach, Allister Coetzee, still put out a Brobdingnagian pack, stacked with three-storey-tall locks, Pieter-Steph du Toit, Lood de Jager and Eben Etzebeth, and a blindside flanker, Willem Alberts, with the build and manner of a brick outhouse. In May, Etzebeth and De Jager set about each other in a match between the Stormers and Cheetahs, a vicious scrap that the referee, Glen Jackson, explained away at the time as “a little South African fun”. The Springboks locks have some odd ideas about what constitutes a good time.

South Africa started hard; Jones said: “The first quarter was the most difficult period, they were so physical at us.” England reeled. They shipped six penalties in the first 20 minutes. Pat Lambie kicked two, and a drop goal.

England responded with a fine simple try, made by some swift, straight passing across field from a lineout and finished by Jonny May. The drizzle, which had been falling since the morning, was now so thick it seemed almost like a fog had fallen across Twickenham. The players’ hair was slick, their shirts soaked through and the ball so slippery that the match looked, at points, like 30 men chasing a stray bar of soap around a Turkish bathhouse.

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Everything seemed to suggest that the game was going to be as tight and tense as the previous three the teams had played – that 14-all draw, the next settled by a single point and the last by three. Then, after 30 minutes, England switched it up. “We regained our composure and control,” said Jones.

They started to land some blows of their own. Chris Robshaw smashed down Rudy Paige, a tackle that shifted the momentum of the play and lifted the mood of the crowd. Then Billy Vunipola, brilliant throughout, battered into Etzebeth and clattered his head. Vunipola blinked. Etzebeth spent three minutes flat on his back before he left the field for a head-injury assessment.

In the next 10 minutes, England scored 13 points from a pair of penalties and Courtney Lawes’s converted try. Jones had also described South Africa’s style as chess on steroids. By half-time, the Springboks were in check, 11 points down. The endgame was not quite as clinical as Jones would have liked. “We’re certainly not satisfied with our performance,” he said and he seemed especially pained that South Africa had scored two tries, the second of them he described as soft.

But England played some wonderful rugby all the same. The best of it by Ben Youngs, who twice diddled the South Africa’s openside, Du Toit, with a couple of deft dummies. It seemed England had taken some inspiration from Ali’s dancing feet as well as his rope-a-dope resilience.